A Fireproof Home for the Bride

by Amy Scheibe

  Emmy felt the weight of Bobby’s sorrow heavy on her heart, but she couldn’t budge. “I only have a couple of hours before deadline.”

  “Fine,” Bobby said, and made a sudden sharp U-turn in the middle of North Terrace. They rode in silence until he pulled the truck over at the curb in front of the employee entrance to The Fargo Forum.

  “I’m sorry,” Emmy said, keeping her hand from reaching for the door handle too quickly.

  “Pete said this would happen,” he muttered.

  She touched his hand; he jerked it away.

  “Your boss is waiting,” he said. “Better hurry along and write your story.”

  Emmy began to combust along the rough edge of her dual desires. “Don’t say that,” she asked, pained by the harshness of his words. “I don’t want to leave it like this.”

  “Then don’t leave.” Bobby’s voice broke completely and he started to silently cry, fighting the emotion with a stiff jaw. Emmy slid across the wide seat and wrapped her arms around him.

  “Don’t make me choose,” she whispered. “You know I love you.” She felt him nod against her shoulder and she held him more tightly. “Tell you what, I’ll get this done as quickly as I can, and then I’ll come straight to your house. I’ve already written the first half, so the rest should be simple enough.”

  Bobby placed his hands on either side of her waist and rested his forehead against hers. “I just can’t stop thinking of him, down in that cellar, alone.”

  “I think he just wanted his mother,” Emmy said. “He’s with her now.”

  Bobby’s eyes glistened in the last light of the day. He kissed her tenderly on the lips and then pressed her across the seat. “I’ll come back for you in an hour.”

  Emmy stepped out onto the curb and watched Bobby drive off, her damp eyes alighting on a different, familiar truck stopped at the red light across the street and down a half block. She took one step in that direction as the engine revved, the tires squealed, and Ambrose drove up, parking in front of her.

  He rolled down the window. “There you are,” he said. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  “I’m certainly very popular today,” she replied, glancing past Ambrose’s stern face into the cab. There sat John Hansen, his features as small as a rabbit’s and similarly lacking expression apart from the occasional twitch. Emmy closed her coat more firmly at the neck. On the far side was Frank Halsey, glowering at her as he drew a red ember to the end of his cigarette.

  “Have you seen Svenja?” Ambrose asked. His voice sounded more angry than concerned. Emmy took a step closer and met his eye.

  “Why? Has something happened?” Emmy said, careful not to betray her friend’s confidence.

  Ambrose turned his head to the others and said something that Emmy couldn’t hear. She stamped the cold from the bottom of each foot as she waited for his reply.

  “John says you’re the only person she ever talks about, that she must have come to you.”

  “You’re wasting your time,” Frank said, leaning in front of John, who remained silent but seemed scared. “She’s halfway to the cities by now.”

  Emmy blinked and Frank threw his cigarette through the window, narrowly missing Emmy’s cheek as she sidestepped.

  “See,” he said. “Never trust a Catholic. You’re all a bunch of liars.”

  “Stop,” Ambrose said to Frank as he pressed the younger man back into his seat with a stiff arm. He turned to Emmy. “Be careful.” A glint of something flashed in his expression, but whether it was shame or pity, Emmy couldn’t tell. He ground the clutch and shifted into gear. “And if you see Svenja, tell her to get on back home.” He rolled up the window and drove off.

  Emmy caught at her hat as though the motion of the departing truck had caused it to come loose, and once the taillights had disappeared around the next corner, she turned quickly toward the entrance of the building, feeling justified for having helped Svenja and yet afraid that she’d pointed the men in the right direction. She wished there were a way to track Svenja down to warn her, but knew any questions would only compromise the situation more. Emmy could only hope that the aunt in Saint Paul was hard for Ambrose to find.

  Eighteen

  The Start of the New

  The seasons slipped from the crispness of autumn straight into the snowy chase of winter shortly after Halloween. It was the earliest snowfall anyone could seem to remember, and all the talk was about how miserable the coming months were sure to be. Not even the Old Farmer’s Almanac would disagree with this foreboding drop in temperature, this gray sky that would not lift. Emmy barely noticed the weather, so consumed was she with her newly elevated role as cub reporter. The job wasn’t exactly fun, since she was assigned to the obituary editor and spent much of her day phoning bereaved families and fact-checking birth and death dates with local courthouses. Still, her hours had shifted to daytime, her pay had improved by ten cents an hour, and she was able to maintain her copy-routing responsibilities as well as fill in for the new switchboard girl whenever necessary.

  Other than church on Sundays, she hadn’t seen Bobby since Jesse’s funeral, as the work on the interstate was now moving around the clock in a feverish pitch to beat the pace of the earth’s freezing in deepening inches. Before long, digging would be impossible. At least she and Bobby had come to an understanding about her work during frequent telephone conversations about everything and nothing—the murmuring sound of Bobby’s voice sparking in Emmy an old-fashioned longing she found comforting on the coldly elongating nights. Still, she had found it useful to diminish her growing ambitions at the newspaper in response to a nagging voice of doubt that whispered in her heart, the sweet nothings of Bobby’s encouragement too flimsy to mute their wistful melody. Emmy understood both her aunt’s and her father’s solitary lives to be wanting of intimacy, and yet she couldn’t help being drawn by the sense of freedom she perceived each of them to embrace, the lack of incorporating the needs of others an accidental boon for their occupations.

  Emmy stood at the stove of her father’s house, staring down into the simmering water as it cooked potatoes she had dug that morning out of Josephine’s frost-riddled garden. Her aunt had entered a whorl of novelistic fecundity, and due to Emmy’s shift to daytime hours, their overlap in the house had vanished. A speck of water splattered out of the pot and stung Emmy’s hand. She rubbed it and switched her gaze momentarily to the large black dog tapping the back of her knee with her warm wet nose. Coffee had rapidly grown into a sizable dog, but if her front paws were any indication, she had a bit yet to grow. She reminded Emmy of one of her grandfather’s blue heelers—Babe—who from birth had no use with being treated as a puppy and so acted like a mature dog.

  “You are the best girl ever,” she said to Coffee, offering a hand to lick before returning her attention to the vat of boiling, steaming water, as though somehow she would find her future foretold in its starchy depths. Going to college seemed increasingly unappealing, even though she had opened up a savings account to that end. The more time she spent watching the seasoned reporters, the more excited she became about recording the daily dramas of human storytelling. How Josephine could be compelled to spend her time alone in a room making up tales when so many real things were happening struck Emmy as odd. Jim called this being a “natural reporter,” which emboldened Emmy to want to see the world and be charged with bringing what she learned back to those who were wed to the safety of a small town.

  “Oh, cook already,” she said into the pot, which set Coffee to whimpering. “Sorry, girl.” Emmy stroked the dog’s head and kissed her on the nose. Coffee swirled in a circle that brushed her warm, muscled flank against Emmy’s skirt and sent sparks of static electricity crackling in the small room as she bolted through the house. Emmy heard the front door open, and she quickly drained the potatoes into a bowl and scraped a large chunk of butter into the middle, placing them on the table—which she had set with a new cheerful cloth of her own making—and swiftly
pulled the roast out of the oven as she listened to her father groan lightly as he hung his coat, and the muffled greeting between man and dog.

  “Hello, there,” she called out merrily as she began to make gravy out of the pan drippings.

  “Hello, Emmy,” her father called back, a familiar weariness in his voice. She’d begun spending Friday nights with Christian, making him a hot meal and bringing Coffee along to cheer him up. Since Lida had died, Christian had grown even slighter in his gray work clothes, and Emmy could no longer deny that he was beginning to waste away. She would arrive at the house, loaded down with food to cook and put up for him to eat the following week. He was grateful, Emmy knew, but each Saturday she’d find much of the food still in the refrigerator, as though he was barely eating anything. She had no idea where he found the strength to keep up the pace at work, what with the end of the sugar beet harvest keeping the plant open all days and hours, requiring seasoned mechanics like Christian to pull countless shifts fixing endless broken belts, slipped gears, truck engines, and whatever else needed tending and tinkering. Emmy could only hope that there was food at work, or that he perhaps frequented Irv’s for more than a glass of ginger ale.

  Emmy finished placing the food on the table and stripped off her apron, entering the living room in time to see Christian ease himself into the old armchair, Coffee’s sweet face cupped between his hands, the dog’s long tail thumping manically on the rug and sending up little puffs of dust with each blow. Emmy stopped short, worried by how tired her father seemed.

  “Hello there, old man.” She squeezed his arm. “Long day?”

  “Smells good in here, Emmy,” he said, moving his fingers from where they scratched the dog’s left ear in order to give her hand a light press in return. His skin felt papery and not exactly cold, but completely devoid of heat. Emmy could feel the bones collect neatly together as she held on to his grasp. She knelt at the side of his chair and looked him in the eye, allowing Coffee to bumble her great-pawed way into Emmy’s lap, where she hugged the dog’s warmth and nuzzled her fleecy neck.

  “Pot roast special,” Emmy said to Christian. “Hope you’re hungry.”

  “Smells good.” He leaned his head against the chair and closed his eyes, relaxing his grip on Emmy. A tiny arrow of worry entered her heart and sunk into her stomach. This is how he would look in his coffin, she thought, shaking her head hard against the gloomy notion.

  She patted his arm and stood. “How about I get out some trays and we can eat in here while we listen to the radio?”

  He nodded. Emmy went back into the kitchen, expecting Coffee to follow her as usual, but wasn’t completely surprised when she didn’t—she’d developed a keen attachment to Christian, or at least to the way that he would generously scratch and rub the dog all over and for a lot longer than anyone else had the inclination to do. Emmy started to hum as she tried not to hold her breath, waiting for the sound of her father rising from his chair to dial in a program of interest. She plated the food and placed it on trays, carrying his into the living room first. He was asleep, Coffee spread against his stocking-clad feet like the bearskin rug out at the lake cabin.

  Emmy retied her apron and placed the hot plates in the still-warm oven, and then she went to the radio and turned the old worn plastic dial until the scratching stopped and some music without words cut through her father’s snoring. She looked at the clock: seven. She looked at her watch, also seven. Sitting down in her mother’s straight-backed chair, Emmy picked up her crocheting and waited for Christian to wake up.

  * * *

  An hour later, Emmy sat across from her still-sleeping father, working on another square of yarn. The music on the radio swelled and stopped, the announcer murmuring about Scheherazade, Rimsky-Korsakov, Vienna State Opera Orchestra, and as Emmy waited for the next piece to start she gazed about the room from the discomfort of her mother’s chair. All other touches of Karin were long gone, taken back out to the farmhouse as a way of telegraphing their owner’s intention of never returning, though she wouldn’t say as much to Christian. There were lighter-colored rectangles on the walls where pictures of Jesus had once hung. Even the doily on the radio had been removed, leaving a permanently darker circle of wood where the slight piece of lace had blocked the effects of the sun. Yet even with the absence of what could be called a feminine touch, the room felt somehow warmer and better used, welcoming. Coffee lifted her head as a car drove past on the street outside. She sniffed the air, but detecting no move on Emmy’s part toward the kitchen and the promise of food scraps, Coffee lowered her muzzle onto her elegantly outstretched foreleg, keeping her eyes slightly open and her nose twitching at the yarn that Emmy pulled up out of the basket next to her feet.

  Christian opened his eyes.

  “Still here?” he asked.

  Emmy nodded. “Hungry?”

  “I reckon I could eat a little.” He shifted in his chair, possibly in pain, but not showing any signs of it. Maybe he’s just tired, Emmy thought, maybe he’s just sad. Maybe this is what it looked like to grieve your last parent, to bury your mother before your children had all grown. Perhaps the freedom of the solitary life was less appealing to those actually living it. Coffee leaped onto all four feet and led the way into the kitchen ahead of Emmy, who stopped at Christian’s chair to help him up with both hands. It was like lifting a boy.

  “Great,” she said, trying to cover her concern with a soft smile. “I kept everything warm, just like the good old days.”

  * * *

  By the time they finished their meal Christian had renewed color in his face, which cheered Emmy considerably. She could almost convince herself that his drawn appearance was merely the result of long work hours and poor appetite, though something else kept gnawing at her as she pretended not to notice his fumbling attempts to sneak food from his plate and into his co-conspirator’s mouth, which rested dutifully on Christian’s knee under the table. No wonder Coffee prefers him, Emmy thought, and it gave her an idea.

  “Dad,” she said as she rose to pour him a cup of coffee from the pot she’d put up while he had slept, “I wonder if I could drop Coffee by on the nights I cover the switchboard? She gets so lonely when I’m not home, and I can’t expect Aunt Josephine to always mind her.” At the mention of her name, the dog sloped out from under the table and ran a quick circle around Emmy’s legs, nearly tripping her return to the table. Christian smiled at the antics and nodded.

  “We wouldn’t mind it, would we, girl?” He poured a small amount of sugar into the cup and began his ritual slow stir, the sound of the spoon scraping up the sweetness at the bottom of the hard plastic the only noise other than the ticking of the clock out in the entryway. She wondered how he could bear the sight of sugar, considering how much he must see in a day’s work.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” he finally said, wiping his mouth with a napkin. “It can get so quiet.”

  “Me too,” she said, and patted his hand. He placed his other hand on top of hers and caught her eye.

  “I’m proud of you, little sister,” he said. “I really am.”

  Emmy smiled. “That means a lot.”

  Christian blew on the surface of his coffee and took a tentative sip just as the phone rang two short bursts. Emmy jumped to her feet, the insistent tone of the seldom used bell drawing her quickly toward it in order to make it stop, if nothing else.

  “Hello?” she asked, remembering the last time she’d answered this same phone, all those months ago, to find Bev on the other end.

  “Emmy?” Birdie’s unmistakable voice sounded odd to Emmy.

  “What is it?” Emmy asked, alarmed by the strained tone. “Is Mother okay?”

  “She’s fine, she’s here,” Birdie whispered with a tremble. “A terrible thing’s happened out at the Hansen farm; it’s all over the radio.”

  “Just tell me.” Emmy said. Christian walked through the living room, his hand extended for the phone. Emmy held up a flat palm. “Birdie? Speak up
. What’s happened?”

  “It’s just awful.” Birdie started to sniff through her words. “John’s been so lost since Svenja left … his parents have … and, oh, God.” Birdie’s tears became muffled and Emmy heard the phone clatter to the floor and other voices in the background.

  “Emmaline.” Ambrose’s voice cut through the noise. “This is not your concern. Birdie was mistaken to call.” The phone clicked off at the other end and Emmy set the receiver into the cradle.

  “Turn the radio to WDAY,” she said to Christian. “Something’s wrong.”

  He carefully worked the dial from one end of the radio to the other, stopping wherever the scratch of words compelled, but nothing more than the usual assortment of disc jockeys, sermons, and advertising could be found. Emmy went back to the phone and dialed rapidly a number she knew better than any other.

  “Carole?” Emmy said. “It’s Emmy. Get me Jim.” In the moment it took for the call to be connected, she waved her father closer and held the receiver between their ears.

  “I tried your house,” Jim said, sounding concerned. “Where are you?”

  “At Dad’s,” Emmy said, glancing at her father. “He’s on the line with me.”

  “Good evening, Mr. Nelson,” Jim said, and then cleared his throat. “I assume you’ve heard about the murder out in Glyndon. Hansen farm.”

  Emmy’s fingers felt cold as the blood drained away from her extremities in order to better protect her heart from what she didn’t want to hear. “Is it John?”

  “I figured you knew them,” Jim said.

  “They go to my church,” Emmy said, thinking of the fear on Svenja’s beautiful face. She could feel her father’s breath as he listened. “My mother’s church,” she amended.

  “Well, there aren’t many details,” Jim said. “But there’s word a Mexican might be responsible. He’s run off, and some men have gone after him, led by something called the”—Emmy heard the sound of Jim flipping through his notebook—“the Citizens’ Council. I talked to their chief—”